TSAI MING-LIANG
蔡明亮
TSAI MING-LIANG
Tsai Ming-liang is a Malaisia-born Taiwanese film director (b. 1957). Yesterday (04.07.09) evening I discovered there is his retrospective at the Louvre Museum's cinema hall. It lasted for 3 days, and today was the last day. Bad that I missed the first two days, good that I made for the last day.
I had seen four of his films before: “Hole” (1998), “What Time Is It There?” (2001), “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” (2003) and “The Wayward Cloud” (2005); today I watched two more: “Rebels of the Neon God” (1992) and “Vive l'amour” (1994), and watched again the “Dragon Inn”. As there are three important films I have not seen, “The River” (1997), “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone” (2006) and “Face” (2009), the following will be just some sketchy remarks, not a through analysis.
Tsai undoubtedly is one of my favourite directors. I remember some years ago I saw “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” on the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn. There is the famous scene with static camera showing the empty cinema hall from the direction of the screen. Then the woman comes into the camera, cleans a little bit here and there, and walks away to the other side. We hear her steps fading away. And the scene continues, with nothing moving, with no music or sound, just camera running, and showing the cinema hall. And it lasts. And it lasts. All together 5 minutes: an instant in ordinary life, but an eternity in a film. I remember the reaction of the festival public: one part had already been bored from the slow film, and this epitome of slowness was too much for them, and so they lost the last bit of interest and walked away. The other part, on the contrary, felt their interest rocketing up, and you could feel the participation and extremely keen attention of the audience who remained. It is surely one of the greatest scenes ever made.
Today, Mr Tsai was himself present on the screening of the last film of the retrospective, which was namely the “Dragon Inn”. After the film he started to talk about this scene – he said that it has often triggered existential questions from journalists and film-makers, like "What is cinema?" No wonder. But then Tsai continued to talk about the film and all of his talk was concentrated about the old tipe of cinemas and their disappearance and his childhood memories from such cinemas etc. It's okay for me; it is true that Tsai succeeds in conveying very well the particular atmosphere of the old cinema-hall (and other places in other films, like the building in the “Hole”). But there is something more which was not said, and this actually triggered my following commentaries.
I would like to stress that the meaning of this scene (as of other Tsai's films) is not so utterly determined by the particular historical context – in such case it wouldn't have great interest for people outside Asia, or outside Taiwan, or outside Taibei, or outside of certain period (for people who have no experience of such type of cinemas). Because in the broadest sense what we are shown in this scene, is time itself, duration itself. In ordinary life, most often we perceive time through movement and change: only when something changes in our perceptual field, we acknowledge the "flow of time". In this sense time would be “the measure of change” (Aristotle), old metaphysical time. But in Tsai’s scene nothing moves, neither in the image nor on the soundtrack. But we know the camera is running. So in reality, watching this scene we face our own duration, our duration is reflected in this scene, pointed out by it. It raises duration to the second power, and transcendes all the symbolic meanings of the scene: I didn't recognize any of the melancholy Tsai himself and some spectators mentioned (caused by the disappearance of old cinemas), no diminishing of the power of acting and thinking (which is the definition of melancholy by Spinoza), but on the contrary, a spectacular growth in the power of acting and thinking, that is, joy. Joy is when we contemplate our power of activity (Spinoza, Ethics, III, prop. 53). In a work of art the joy (in this sense) is usually achieved in more indirect way, through certain configurations of the elements specific to that art (e.g. masses of matter in sculpture, notes in music, etc.), but in the case of this scene this mechanism attains the maximum simplicity: as nothing changes, we detach from the configurations, and what remains is the pure formal consciousness “the camera is running”. Or, to put it even more simply, we explicitly know that we are watching a movie (or in this case, a “stillie”); what is “shown” in the film, is our own watching. We watch watching. This corresponds to the structure of consciousness: in it we are conscious of something, and at the same time we are conscious of being conscious – these two aspects cannot be separated.
Or to put it in Sartre’s terms, it explicits our being as being-for-itself who “is what it is not, and is not what it is”. To explain it plainly: On the one hand I am what I am becoming: what sets me going are my projects for the future, in this sense “I am” my projects. But these projects, precisely, are not – and so “I am what I am not (yet)”. On the other hand, I am what I have become, I am my whole past. But the past is gone, time it is constantly pushed back to past, so every instant I am not what I was – and so “I am not what I am”. “Being” as an “in-itself” can never be attained (with this affirmation I am pushing Sartre somewhat further than he himself perhaps would have permitted). In our daily life we illude ourselves with dreams like “If I have obtained this or if I have done that, then I will start to be”, but this “being” never comes, or if it would come, then eo ipso we would not be, there would be no consciousness to apprehend it, as consciousness is not in-itself, but for-itself.
The impossibility for us to “be what we are” (in-itself) entails a basic freedom for every human person. We are nevel fully determined neither by our past nor by our future, neither by plans nor by memories, but past and future, plans and memories enter continuously in a creative and changing whole which is not wholly determined by its elements or by its states, but which necessarily “overviews” certain time and space as a whole. This freedom is also a part of Tsai’s working method. He says that he doesn’t like to write a detailed script and even if he has one, most often it will be modified strongly in the process of filming; the same applies to his style of working with actors:
My scripts are very small. They're like poetry, only containing instructions on how to make my films. When I write my scripts, there is no dialogue for the actors, but I communicate a lot with them so that when they are in settings, they have an idea of how to communicate their characters. This style lets actors experience life and act in the film. My actors are not like Hollywood actors-they are not taught how to act or speak. My actors seem like real people. You don't think of them as performing. I always give the actors a lot of time within the shot. I wait and then they act naturally. This is the best technique. (http://www.yale.edu/wake/fall03/tsai.html)
Tsai avoids two unrealistic conceptions of freedom, determinism and voluntarism. He certainly is not a dictator-type director who would prescribe everything in the process of shooting the film, or who would depict his characters as victims to inner or outer driving motives. But on the other hand this entails neither arbitrariness in the working process (Tsai “communicates a lot” with his actors, so that the outcome is surely not casual) nor voluntarism on the level of depicted characters (who by an absolutely “autonomous will” would decide actions). Tsai’s freedom is more like an expression of life itself, or of the ontological conditions of conscious life (being-for-itself).
From this follows the naturalness of Tsai’s characters (“My actors seem like real people”):
I just think the action has to be right. I try to record the fact of the action on film. I want the public to believe the action, to believe in its truth. This is very important. The same applies for the actors. Some actors act in such a way that one does not believe their actions, that they hold any truth or any relation to reality. This is why I do not want my actors to act. On the other hand, if you place a camera in front of a person, this person will start to act. This is why I am always searching for things I can leave out, especially in terms of the actors' performance. (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/tsai_interview.html)
Indeed, the actors behave as if the camera wasn’t there: they scratch themselves, search something between the teeth, masturbate etc. In his “Laughter” Bergson indicates that comedy draws attention to the bodily aspect of a character, while tragedy avoids bodily allusions (tragic hero doesn’t eat, sleep, and even avoids sitting down, let alone that s/he would scratch him/herself or masturbate) – and so this constant naturalness in bodily behaviour gives comic potential to Tsai’s films. In Jarod Rapfogel’s words:
In film after film, Lee spends a great deal of screen time alone, behaving the way people generally behave (but are rarely portrayed behaving) when they're alone – that is to say, very oddly. … . This is behavior that seems a stone's throw from insanity, but it's behavior most of us would indulge in (assuming we don't) if we didn't take such care to observe ourselves when no one else is around. Tsai's affection for this side of his characters is one way in which he locates the comedy in their solitude.” (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/tsai_interview.html)
All of Tsai’s films deal with human contacts and communication. The characters are isolated, separated, but they tend toward the other. Mostly this tending is frustrated so that the characters don’t fully meet each other. And in Sartre's terms this would be something essential: we cannot get the other as a being-in-itself, but other human being represents an irreducible liberty, an ecaping-hole in my world, and so we are condemned forever to be-towards-the-other without getting the other. Something escapes us. The sexuality, in the first instance. Tsai's characters are sexual, and they do not suppress it, they don't have any freudian problems. Sexuality for them is more like an existential problem or question: it forces us toward the other, but we can never actually attain the other. So they often masturbate, but masturbation doesn't give any answer, and neither gives fucking.
What escapes us, is our bodily being-toward-other (sexuality), and also the other in the form of the look. This introduces another sartrian term into Tsai's art.
“I don’t believe in dialogues in cinema. I think that cinema is essentially an art of observation. It goes through the looking and reflexion on what one looks.” (Booklet of the retrospective, p. 5, my translation from French)
Looking has always been important in his films. I talked about the activation of the gaze of the spectator, but it is a pervading theme in the films themselves. For instance, (1) in “Vive l'amour” Ah-jung and Mei make love on the bed, and Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) is at the same time under the bed; the sexual act "upon" is contained in the consciousness of an "underneath", in Hsiao-kang's "look" or apprehension. This metaphorically even turns Freud topsy-turvy: it is not the sexuality as such (or physiology) that is basic, with the consciousness built on top of it, but the other way round, the sexuality is embraced in a more basic consciousness (of being-for-itself which is at the same time a being-for-other). The sexuality doesn’t explain anything, but it itself needs to be explained. (2) Or when, at the end of the “Wayward Cloud” the main character fucks the unconscious body of the japanese whore, while looking through the wall the main female character. This could be interpreted as a radical separation between the body (fucking) and the soul (looking), but I have the intuition that this interpretation doesn’t work. The sexual body is not represented in Tsai’s films as a “prison” of the soul or as something shameful – fucking and looking are rather two modalities of being-toward-other, and it would be difficult so separate them, as looking is already desiring and fucking is also “looking” in the sense of being present as a being-for-itself for another being-for-itself. For me this scene embodies more the meaning of the radical unattainability of the other. The gaze of a fucking animal (or human being) usually becomes hazy, as it illudes in the sexual act to attain both the other and his/her own self, but here the gaze remains clear. (3) Or in “Vive l’amour”, where Hsiao-kang (male) kisses Ah-jung (male) who is sleeping, and doesn’t awake. The possibility that the other wakes up and discovers the homosexual move makes the long scene extremely powerful and full of tension. But again, there is no reciprocity as the other continues to sleep. (4) In “Vive l’amour” Hsiao-kang occupies secretly an appartment which is on sale. It is evening and after two or three hesitations he makes up the nerve to cut the veins of his wrist. He lies on the bed, ready for dying, eyes closed. Then suddenly he hears the door open, and he opens his eyes in panic, as this sound represents the presence of the other (this is the concept of the Look). And tragedy is turned into comedy: a few instants before he was ready to die, but now he is ashamed of being discovered.
“Psychology” is a means to reduce the mystery of the other, because we can “understand” why (s)he behaves like this, we can see his/her motives as inner causes behind his/her actions. But it is remarkable that Tsai Ming-liang’s characters don’t have any psychology. This doesn’t mean that they don’t feel, but only that we don’t know why they act and emote as they do. In an interview, the journalist comments:
Journalist: “We are focussed on his [the actors’ – M.O] movements, on the action, and not on what he might be thinking.” – Tsai Ming-liang: “True. … But I also want the public to feel they do not know where they stand. So the spectator has to take some time to see what is actually happening. I do not want to explain the action to the public. They need time to see for themselves. But they have to cooperate. I show of course the essence of the matter, the main point of a scene. But I want everyone for him or herself, with his or her own background, to look at the scene and to participate in the scene by thinking about it. And only then it is right. Because of this every viewer constructs his or her own film. He or she constructs his or her own film experience. And of course I hand him/her several things during the process. For me, this is one of the most important things of making films.” (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/tsai_interview.html)
So, Tsai depicts actions which arise from a being-for-itself, but they don’t express any “interiority” or inner depth, an in-itself. The characters remain a mystery to us and to each other. Tsai's characters rarely speak (speech as an expression of interiority).
When an early film like “The Rebels” (1992) contains still a rather clear plot and story (although in retrospective from later films they seem odd enough) and a certain “psychology”, then already two years later, in “Vive l’amour” there is no plot where the characters would evolve, and surely they are not taken in the strife between inner wishes and outer realities. Tsai’s characters are rather “passive” in this sense, but they do show concern for other, desire for other. Only they refuse to be captured in the vertical logic (social heights and inner depths) of the society – this is one of the reasons why Tsai’s characters are most often “small people” or outcasts. Being and having are often inversely proportional… (Where “being” still means the sartreian being-for-itself which is what it is not and is not what it is).
The least stingy people are the ones that are poor. The characters in my films are people who don't have much. There is nothing more important than having a connection with another person. (http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-30887365_ITM)
Tsai’s films have often been compared to paintings in the sense that there is little development inside a film and also between the films (Tsai has in all films used the same male actor Lee Kang-sheng), and it is said that his films are more like different angles on the same thing or question.
Small gestures of everyday life substitute to a large extent a complex sentimental intrigue. (http://www.cinemasie.com/fr/fiche/dossier/297/, my translation from French)
To end with, I would mention two repeating images, rain and holes. Rain is one image that repeats itself through Tsai’s films, as well as water in other forms (inondation of the apartment’s floor in the “Rebels” – which gives occasion to a truly Tarkovskian scene with floating objects –, bathtubs, sweat of the characters in hot Taibei, juicy watermelons etc). Water is too polyvalent – perhaps the most polyvalent symbol – for the interpretations to be taken too seriously (“A profoundly ambiguous metaphor, whose significance can't quite be put into words”, Jared Rapfogel, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/tsai_painter.html). But we can mention some of them. In the broadest sense,
(1) rain helps to bring together – characters, scenes, films – as it falls upon everyone equally (as is said in the Lotus sutra) or is transpired by everyone equally (sweat due to the heat),
(2) but at the same time it isolates people, confines them into covered spaces or leaves them to deal with their own body if outdoors (I once saw a documentary on orang-outans who don’t like the rain and who break a handful of branches and prepare rudimentary umbrellas for themselves – they looked really sad sitting on the branches, each one separately, and holding their “umbrellas” over their head).
(3) And of course, water is a common symbol for change and plasticity:
It happens in Asia like that, things just disappear. People in their forties have no way of finding traces of their childhood. Modern people are afraid of disappearance. Living in Taipei, for example, we constantly have to deal with compelling visual change. We ask the question: what do you love the most? Who do you love the most? You will lose them - it will happen in modern society. My films ask the question: how we can face the disappearance? The loss?
At the beginning I mentioned the static camera technique of Tsai. We could say that rain is like a “static change”. In order to convey this idea, rain is even more powerful an image than river or sea, as these latter are bounded by shores, but rain has no clear limits. Rain is much less a “thing” than a river, it is more of an atmosphere, in both meanings of the word, as environment and as mood.
(4) Water is the most powerful solvent, both chemically and metaphorically. It tends do dilute the clear-cut things and individuals, to bring them back into the primordial chaos and interpenetration of everything; in initiations and purifications water is one of the most universal elements: like baptism which is intended to dissolve the “old man”, so that a “new man” would surge from the baptismal waters: this symbolism is in no way particular only to christianity (cf Eliade). So also Tsai’s rain (and other forms of water) dissolve things and individualities, and perhaps it can also be seen as nature’s attempt to purify the urbanized Taibei (although I don’t know how pure or polluted it actually is there).
Holes are also common in Tsai’s films:
(1) Whole “Hole” is constructed around the theme of a hole between two floors.
(2) Hole refers also to bodily orifices. Cf to a famous story from the end of “Inner chapters” of “Zhuangzi”: “The Ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu, the Ruler of the Northern Ocean was Hu, and the Ruler of the Centre was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said, 'Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing, while this (poor) Ruler alone has not one. Let us try and make them for him.' Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day; and at the end of seven days Chaos died” (tr. by J. Legge, http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=2713&if=en). Holes are perforations in our surface by which we communicate with each other. So on the one hand hole presumes the existence of interior and exterior, some constituted individuality, distincions of self/other, characterized in Zhuangzi’s story by the rulers of North and South. Bodily apertures are the physical mediums of our being-toward-other. The look we talked about is realized through the eyes as holes in the skull. Sexuality is also realized at least through one hole, sometimes called the Hole with capital letter.
(3) Holes in watermelons: in “Vive l’amour” Hsiao Kang starts to carve holes into the watermelon. We don’t know what he is up to. He seems to sculpt the figure of a head: we see two “eyes” and a “mouth”. But then he uses the three holes to put his fingers into them and to play bowling (one example of unexpected and comic outcome in Tsai). And in “Wayward Cloud” the watermelon is used in sexual games.
(4) Leakages in various films: in “Vive l’amour” the sound of the emptying bathtub and the image of last water going through the hole changes at once into the Look for Hsiao Kang, as he knows now that he is not alone, but that there is somebody. Or the obstructed hole in the “Rebels” which causes an inundation in the apartment – at first it is casual occurrence, but later the male character in the film intentionally obstructs the hole by feminine underpants (if I remember correctly), and it takes two attempts, because at the beginning the pants come out (again a comic element). This and
(5) water-bottles bring together the figures of water and a hole. We have a current (water) and something which regulates it (hole). If rain is water in an undetermined chaotic state (raindrops are hardly individualities for us), then water through a hole (bathtub or bottle) represents a “regulated” water. Rain would be preindividual and leak would be the beginning of individualization as it brings together a process, a dispersed and formless flow of water, and regulates it.
In a philosophical sense the characters also “leak” toward each other, the “other” is an existential hole or leaking-point for a consciousness or being-for-itself. To use an old pun, it could be said that it is namely through a hole that a person becomes a whole: that is, he will never be a self-sufficient being-in-itself, but can exist only by a leak, by a want, by a “nothing” in Sartre’s sense, by a “not-yet” in Heidegger’s sense, in short, as a (w)hole.
But I would not continue the pun: Tsai is neither holy nor are his films a howl (cf Ginsberg); these two are already too individuated; instead, Tsai moves in prior steps of individualization. So, in conclusion I would say that his films are not so much about loneliness (which presuppose a constituted subject), as critics say, but more on the constitution processes of subjects who perhaps discover their loneliness as a result, leaking forever toward the other. Leaking loneliness. First rain, then leaking, then lonely.
Another interesting feature is Tsai Ming-liang’s special relationship with the actor Lee Kang-sheng who acts in all Tsai’s films, and does it under his real nickname (Hsiao Kang, or Little Kang). It seems that creating films, through the art of cinema, the “real” persons Tsai and Lee also in a way create themselves. Tsai talks about “Wayward Cloud” that: “I had also to overcome my own taboos concerning the bodies” and a little bit later, about Lee’s acting in the same film: “his acting has affirmed itself, not in the sense that he would have acquired a type of acting as it is understood in the commercial cinema, but he has come to accept himself as he is. He emanates now something strong and mature” (http://www.cinemasie.com/fr/fiche/dossier/233/, my translation from French). So, creating a work of art, at the same time they create themselves. And a creation that would leave the person untouched is poor creation.